David Carmichael

David was born and raised in southwestern Pennsylvania amid the steel mills, coal mines and rolling green hills of the Monongahela valley. From a very early age he spent hours in the woods near his home filling notebooks and tablets with pencil and charcoal images of nature. He would often “flesh out” these drawings with coal ash or the pigmented ores he found in the railroad cars outside of the steel mills.

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David Carmichael

David was born and raised in southwestern Pennsylvania amid the steel mills, coal mines and rolling green hills of the Monongahela valley. From a very early age he spent hours in the woods near his home filling notebooks and tablets with pencil and charcoal images of nature. He would often “flesh out” these drawings with coal ash or the pigmented ores he found in the railroad cars outside of the steel mills. Without realizing it at the time this close observation of his surroundings sensitized him to the lines and forms found in nature. This early connection has never left him and still infuses his sculpture. Though predominately abstract the organic forms of his sculpture are of nature re-imagined. He painted in oils from age ten to about seventeen mostly on boards and cardboard and the occasional canvas board. In the context of his cultural environment such activity was viewed as something to grow out of rather than in to. It was a long time before his creativity was expressed in visual art again.

It wasn’t until attending Duquesne University in Pittsburgh that David experienced his first “real” art. It was the beginning of his love of museums. The art he has experienced hanging on their walls and standing on their floors and the artists who created them have been his life long teachers.

He spent four years as a Marine Corpsman. Upon his discharge he found himself in southern California where he has been ever since. After a couple of years re-orienting to civilian life and life in general he became a hands-on landscape designer in Laguna Beach before embarking on a personal quest and exploration at the end of which he found himself living in a small mountain community near Los Angeles and working as a fine woodworker. He designed and crafted custom furniture and architectural details as well as crafting reproductions of classical work, often working closely with interior designers and architects. The work he created often had sculptural aspects and incorporated carved designs although these were more often of a decorative nature than an expressive art, though that distinction can be a fine one. Outside of an early mentor he was largely self taught and self educated in these endeavors as he is in stone sculpture.

And then came the stone. The moment David first touched chisel to stone the connection was instantaneous and profound. A luminous struck-by-lightning awakening. He knew without question (except why he had not been doing it from the time he could do anything) that it was what he was meant to do. Although he now works in other sculptural media as well it is stone that is his passion.

Each stone is a journey. Some begin with clarity, some with resistance and struggle. The initial connection between David and the stone evolves and deepens as an interplay between the form and energy inherent in the stone and his own internal process of discovery and exploration. It is the experience of that process that inspires and vivifies. The resulting creation, the sculpture, has a depth and spirit of its own. David works the stone to give shape to his thoughts and feelings while the stone, in turn, inspires his thoughts and guides his hand and eye

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